Menu

Login

TechTitans

From cybersecurity to mobile apps to cloud computing, Washington’s tech scene has never been more diverse or inspiring. Here are the people influencing the next generation of technologies and changing how we interact with the world around us. By Garrett Graff

Entrepreneurs

Magid Abraham

The CEO and cofounder of comScore has carved out an important niche in online marketing, measuring trends and Web traffic across a variety of digital platforms.@m_abraham

Reggie Aggarwal

The founder and CEO of Cvent has built the event-management
software company into a global powerhouse—with 1,100 employees as well as
customers in more than 100 countries who have helped manage 500,000 events.

Stewart Allen

The chief technology officer of AddThis, formerly Clearspring,
is among the biggest brains on the local tech scene. AddThis has one of
the Web’s largest data troves, processing 70 terabytes of social data
weekly and reaching 1.3 billion Internet users a month.

Zvi Band

The DC tech booster’s own start-up, Contactually—which helps
users manage their contacts and relationships—is growing strong, having
raised its first million in seed funding.
@skeevis

Sid Banerjee

The cofounder and CEO of Clarabridge is helping the
customer-feedback-mining company stay at the forefront of a fast-evolving
market.

James Bankoff

The former AOL executive has built a Web empire at Vox Media
around “passionate” communities of sports nuts (SB Nation), video-game
fans (Polygon), and gadget fiends (The Verge)—publishing in all about
400,000 pieces of content in 2012, which attracted 35 million
comments.
@bankoff

Danny Boice

The cofounder of Speek is trying to revolutionize conference
calls with new online tools.
@DannyBoice

Matt Calkins

The CEO of the work-automation company Appian provides services
to organizations ranging from Amazon to the US Army—and finds time to be a
master board-game player, finishing among the top five in the 2012 World
Boardgaming Championships.

Tom Davidson

It’s hard for a company to get a stronger vote of confidence
than a round of new funding led by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Eric
Schmidt, and Twitter’s Evan Williams. Davidson’s online education and
financial-literacy company, EverFi—which has reached 5.5 million college
students nationwide since its start—got such a boost, to the tune of $10
million.
@tommydavidson

Mark D. Ein

The tech entrepreneur—founder and CEO of Venturehouse
Group—leads the Kastle Systems security company by day and on summer
nights cheers on his professional tennis team, the Washington Kastles, at
DC’s Southwest waterfront.

Hossein Fateh

The cofounder of DuPont Fabros Technology, one of Northern
Virginia’s largest data-center companies, has deep roots in Washington,
and his facilities are the local hubs for companies such as Yahoo and
Facebook.

Matt Fellowes

The onetime Brookings fellow was moved to launch HelloWallet,
his financial-literacy and personal-budgeting start-up, after realizing
that most lower- and middle-class households lacked easy access to
financial help.
@mattfellowes

Raul Fernandez

The sports-team partner with Ted Leonsis and others is chair of
the video-surveillance innovator ObjectVideo and an adviser to the
venture-growth firm General Atlantic, among his other
projects.

Ching-Ho Fung

The CEO of the Herndon-based customer-service-software company
Parature is a longtime Virginia tech player and is known to all of his
employees as CHF (pronounced “chef”).
@chinghofung

Dev Ganesan

The CEO at the digital publisher Aptara is also involved with a
number of start-ups in Washington and Silicon Valley.

Miles Gilburne

The longtime local investor is now CEO of ePals, which connects
K-12 students and classrooms around the world.

Shane Green

The cofounder of Personal, a data vault for “everything that
isn’t social,” has been working for years at strengthening personal-data
ownership and controls.
@shanegreen

Marci Harris

The former House Ways and Means Committee staffer—named one of
Fast Company’s100 most creative people in business last
year—started PopVox to help constituents communicate better with
Congress. Photograph by Jake Brewer@marcidale

Tim O’Shaughnessy

The confounder of Living-Social—now its CEO—is a major power in
the start-up field, even though his company faces stronger headwinds than
it did two years ago.
@oshy

Michael J. Saylor and Sanju Bansal

With cofounder Saylor as CEO and Bansal as COO, MicroStrategy
booked $595 million in revenue in 2012, and a recent focus on its core
business has led analysts to upgrade the outlook for its long-struggling
stock.
@michael_saylor

Bradley and Sheryl Schwartz

The couple running the government-tech contractor Blue Canopy
continue to be recognized for their growth and work, including with last
year’s Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award.

Fred Singer

Mark Walsh

The veteran DC tech leader, now president of the start-up
FedBid, is building an online marketplace for federal agencies and other
big purchasers. In 2012, he helped out with more than $1.4 billion in
transactions and 60,000 vendors.
@walsh

Dan Yates

The White House has singled out Yates—CEO and cofounder of
Opower, which encourages consumer-energy efficiency—as an example of the
next generation of start-ups. The firm appears poised for an IPO in the
near future, particularly with technologist Alex Kinnier heading its
product services.
@danjyates

Industry Leaders

Anne Altman

The three-decade veteran of IBM and former general manager of
the corporation’s global public-sector business has returned to lead its
multibillion-dollar federal-government unit as the budget environment
tightens.
@AnneAltman

Kristine Martin Anderson

Booz Allen Hamilton’s leader on health IT has spent more than
two decades working at the nexus of technology and health
care.

Teresa Carlson

Amazon’s vice president for the global public sector has helped
the company capitalize on the federal government’s move to cloud
computing, including hosting the National Institutes of Health’s 1000
Genomes Project, which provided 200 terabytes of genomics data free
online.
@teresacarlson

Ed Casey

The CEO of Serco North America continues to expand the
government IT contractor, now with $1.4 billion in revenue and more than
8,500 employees.

Pablo Chavez and Susan Molinari

Google is learning that its fate as a growing tech leader is
ever more tied to the federal government, in terms of both business and
regulation. Chavez, its head of public policy, and Molinari, head of its
Washington office, work closely with regulators, the Hill, and their
colleague Mike Bradshaw, who leads Google Federal’s business
unit.

Steve Cooker

The head of Monster.com’s Global Government Solutions Division,
who also manages Military.com, has made veterans’ employment and workforce
transition a cornerstone of his programs.

John Crupi

The chief technology officer of the business-intelligence and
data provider JackBe continues to impress with the company’s Presto
software.
@johncrupi

Amr ElSawy

The leader of Noblis, a nonprofit consulting firm born out of
the government’s technology challenges in World War II, recently did away
with job titles at the organization to encourage a more flexible and
entrepreneurial workforce.

Fred Humphries

Microsoft’s vice president for US government affairs—the
company’s top representative in Washington—used to work for Congressman
Richard Gephardt. Today Humphries collaborates with Ed Ingle, the software
giant’s managing director for government affairs, to ensure that its voice
is heard.
@Fredhum

John P. Jumper

The relatively new head of SAIC has shaken up the
science-and-technology company, effectively splitting it into government
and commercial divisions.

Kay Kapoor

The new head of $4.5-billion AT&T’s government-services
division has spent nearly her entire career in federal IT
solutions.

Sudhakar Kesavan

The green-tech consulting firm ICF International continues to
grow quickly in a hot industry under Kesavan.

Bobbie Kilberg

Now in her 15th year of leading the Northern Virginia
Technology Council, the region’s most influential tech trade group,
Kilberg is watching the next generation of her family assume power, too:
Daughter Cameron Kilberg is Virginia’s assistant secretary of
technology.

Marne Levine

Larry Summers’s former chief of staff on the National Economic
Council has added lobbying weight to Facebook as its vice president for
global public policy. Meanwhile, the DC political-outreach team of Katie
Harbath and Adam Conner is helping train politicians on how to use the
platform.

Robert Marshall

Earth Networks, the Germantown company headed by Marshall, runs
the WeatherBug network—one of the Internet’s indispensable tools—and is
now the official lightning tracker for the National Weather
Service.

Kristin Muhlner

The CEO of newBrandAnalytics, who started at the three-year-old
firm last fall, helps more than 2,500 companies analyze how their
customers are reacting on social media.

Robert Musslewhite

As CEO, he has transformed the Advisory Board Company—founded
and taken public by David Bradley—from a health-care consulting firm to a
business-technology provider. Nearly half of all hospital inpatient
admissions in the US are now run through the company’s
software.
@rmussle

James Patterson

The “entrepreneur in residence” at Capital One Labs is trying
to reimagine how the financial company’s customers use and manage their
money.
@jamesppatterson

David W. Thompson

Orbital, the Dulles satellite-launch company headed by
Thompson, recently completed a rocket test at the Mid-Atlantic Regional
Spaceport, the launch facility at Wallops Island, Virginia.

Steve Trundle

The CEO of the security company Alarm.com has built a platform
used by more than a million customers to access their home security
systems remotely.

John Wood

The Telos Corporation CEO has a strong portfolio in cyber- and
network-defense technologies and plays a large philanthropic role with
organizations including Wolf Trap and the Tragedy Assistance Program for
Survivors.
@john_b_wood

Government 2.0

Keith Alexander

The four-star general and head of the National Security Agency
oversees the US Cyber Command, making him the nation’s first line of
defense—and offense—in the emerging cybersecurity threat.

Sheila Campbell, Bev Godwin, and Gwynne
Kostin

The three tech leaders at the General Services Administration
are helping federal Web managers implement new technologies and better
inform the public.
@sheliadcusa@BevUSA@gwynnek

Cristin Dorgelo

Her title is a mouthful—assistant director for grand challenges
in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy—but the more
than 200 challenges in search of solutions she has issued to the American
public at Challenge.gov, under the direction of John P. Holdren, have
pushed US innovation forward on everything from energy-efficient light
bulbs and air-pollution monitoring to arms control and health
care.
@cristindorgelo

Patrick Gallagher

The physicist turned director of the National Institute of
Standards and Technology has a critical—and underappreciated—role in
infrastructure protection.

Bob Goodlatte

The 11-term Republican congressman from Roanoke, now chair of
the House Judiciary Committee, is cochair of the Congressional Internet
Caucus and one of its leading voices on high-tech issues such as
intellectual property.
@RepGoodlatte

Tag Greason

The Virginia state delegate from Ashburn has been instrumental
in helping the Washington area’s booming business in data centers, an
industry he knows well as an executive at Quality Technology
Services.
@TagGreason

Pete Jobse

The president of Virginia’s Center for Innovative Technology,
Jobse plays a crucial role in early-stage seed funding, including a new
state-sponsored cyber-accelerator program that will create 15 to 20
cybersecurity companies a year.
@petejobse

George Kurtz and Dmitri Alperovitch

The cofounders of CrowdStrike—which is developing a reputation
at the leading edge of the shadowy cybersecurity-and-cyberwarfare
sphere—are building one of the industry’s most intriguing teams, including
former FBI executives Shawn Henry and Steven Chabinsky.
@George_Kurtz@DmitriCyber

Matt Lira

The new deputy executive director of the National Republican
Sentaorial Committee is hoping to revive and rebuild the GOP’s online
efforts after getting out-organized in 2012.
@MattLira

Jennifer Pahlka

The founder and executive director of Code for America is
reimagining government for the 21st century, and CFA’s fellowships, now in
their third year, have brought talented developers and programmers into
public service.
@pahlkadot

Alan Paller

The founder of the SANS Institute, a graduate school in
Bethesda for training cyberwarriors, has become an international leader,
preparing more than 100,000 cybersecurity technologists in 72
countries.

Macon Phillips

The White House director of digital strategy has helped Barack
Obama build his own pipeline to the public and push government-wide
adoption of new technologies.
@macon44

Logan Powell

His LinkedIn profile lists him simply as a “pragmatist,” but
people across the government have come to respect the Census Bureau
public-affairs specialist for his work making census data available
online.
@logantpowell

Arati Prabhakar

The first woman to head the National Institute of Standards and
Technology, a position she held from 1993 to 1997, the physicist and
engineer now leads the US military’s well-funded top inventor, the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency.

PhD: Her 1985 Caltech doctoral dissertation was the first by a
woman in the university’s applied-sciences department.

Joe Rospars

The cofounder of Blue State Digital is best known as the chief
digital strategist for Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns.
@rospars

Patrick Ruffini

As the GOP remakes itself for the digital age—and for younger
voters—Ruffini’s firm, Engage, is playing a key role.
@PatrickRuffini

Bryan Sivak

The new CTO of the Department of Health and Human Services is
helping push the medical world online—particularly developing the online
tools to navigate the President’s health-care reform.
@BryanSivak

Teresa M. Takai

A veteran of Ford Motor Company and California’s former chief
information officer, the Defense Department CIO oversees a huge slice of
the area’s tech spending.

Jeanne Tisinger

The CIA’s chief information officer has a reputation for
innovation and is pushing the boundaries of the intelligence community’s
tech involvement through partnerships with such entities as Amazon’s
cloud-computing services.

Ken Ulman

The county executive of Howard County teamed up with his CIO,
Ira Levy, to launch a stimulus-funded intercounty broadband network that
will bring 800 miles of new fiber to ten Maryland jurisdictions this
year.
@kenulman

Steven VanRoekel and Todd Park

The nation’s chief information officer and chief technology
officer, respectively, are helping the government adapt to the world of
cloud computing, mobile apps, and “big data.”
@stevenvDC@todd_park

Mark Warner

The Virginia governor turned senator has found the US Senate
frustrating and therefore has focused on areas such as tech and
competitiveness where he feels he can make a real difference.
@MarkWarner

Dealmakers

Errol Arkilic

The director of the National Science Foundation’s Innovation
Corps—now in its second year of a three-year pilot phase—aims to connect
academic researchers with the marketplace, tying promising studies to
commercial enterprises.

Peter Barris

A longtime fixture on the local venture scene, New Enterprise
Associates—led by Barris, its managing general partner—shows no sign of
slowing down. Last year, it closed its 14th fund, worth about $2.6
billion, one of the largest local ones ever.

Steve Case

The longtime local leader and AOL cofounder has taken on a
national profile in recent years, heading the Startup America Partnership
and pushing federal policies to encourage entrepreneurship, even as his
day job as CEO of Revolution continues to thrive under the stewardship of
Tige Savage and Donn Davis.
@SteveCase

Brooke Coburn

The managing director of the local powerhouse Carlyle Group
handles the venture-capital firm’s growth-capital arm, focused on
small-cap technology, education, and media companies.

Christopher Darby

Founded amid the dot-com boom of the 1990s, In-Q-Tel—the CIA’s
equivalent of a venture-capital firm—tries to identify and increase
technologies to help the intelligence world, giving CEO Darby one of the
most intriguing portfolios of any local funder.

Ted Leonsis

Washington may now think of him mostly as a sports-team owner
(go, Caps!), but the billionaire AOL executive remains intimately involved
in the technology world, including heading the start-up SnagFilms and
stepping in this spring as acting co-CEO at Groupon to help the
daily-deals company recover from its falling stock price.
@TedLeonsis

Mike Lincoln

The partner at the law firm Cooley, who is deeply involved in
the local venture-and-entrepreneur community, is the go-to dealmaker for
tech mergers and acquisitions.
@lincolnmr

Robert McHale

The Reston-based technology headhunter for the global search
firm Korn/Ferry International, McHale scours the region for top
talent.

Dan Mindus

The cofounder of NextGen Angels is trying to organize young
tech minds to provide crucial early-stage funding.
@DanMindus

Don Rainey

A general partner at Grotech, Rainey has helped establish the
venture company as one of the region’s hottest backers and, in addition to
various side projects with the military, sits on the boards of
LivingSocial, HelloWallet, and Clarabridge, among others.
@drainey1

Ralph Terkowitz

The general partner at the late-stage-venture-capital firm ABS
Capital Partners has a broad portfolio, from the advertiser Vibrant to the
“social intelligence” firm Syncapse.
@rterkowitz

Community Leaders

Michael Beckerman

The head of the new Internet Association—which has unified more
than a dozen Internet giants including Amazon, Google, eBay, and Yahoo
into a single lobbying powerhouse after last year’s Stop Online Piracy Act
(SOPA) fight—brings with him more than a decade of Hill experience, mostly
with the chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Evan Burfield and Donna Harris

Burfield and Harris’s still-nascent “accelerator,” 1776, is
part of DC’s dream to expand its tech sector, an effort led by David
Zipper, the District’s director of business development and
strategy.
@eburdield@dharrisindc

Mary Ellen Callahan

As the longest-serving chief privacy officer for the Department
of Homeland Security—the first statutorily mandated privacy office in a
federal agency—Callahan had skills in high demand when she left the
government last year. She’s now a partner at the law firm Jenner &
Block.

Andy Carvin

The NPR social-media strategist, who all but invented Twitter
as a news source during the Arab Spring, continues to pioneer the coverage
of breaking news from afar.
@acarvin

Vint Cerf, Steve Crocker, and Robert E. Kahn

The trio who helped invent the Internet—no, really—are all
still active members of the tech community and among its smartest minds:
Cerf is vice president and “chief Internet evangelist” at Google; Crocker
is chair of the board of directors of ICANN, which oversees the Internet’s
naming system; and Kahn is CEO of the Corporation for National Research
Initiatives.

Aneesh Chopra and Pete Snyder

One of the most interesting political stories of the year will
be the Old Dominion’s race for lieutenant governor, which might end up as
a battle between two Northern Virginia tech leaders—Democrat Chopra,
President Obama’s first US chief technology officer, and Republican
Snyder, who founded the social-media marketing firm New Media
Strategies.
@aneeshchopra@petesnyder

Jen Consalvo and Frank Gruber

The cofounders of Tech Cocktail have developed what was a
casual professional networking group into a coast-to-coast forum for
start-ups, with events—from small-scale mixers to big tech festivals—in
20-plus cities.
@noreaster@FrankGruber

Elana Fine

The head of the University of Maryland’s Dingman Center for
Entrepreneurship is encouraging more education aimed at start-ups and
commercializing students’ ideas.
@elanafine

Michael Goldstein and Jonathon Perrelli

Goldstein’s accelerator, Exhilarator, and Perrelli’s Fortify
Ventures both aim to launch the next hot local tech company.
@mgoldie@perrelli

Stephanie Hay and Rebecca Thorman

These two leaders of the DC Lean Startup Circle help
early-stage entrepreneurs and companies bring their ideas to
market.
@steph_hay@kontrary

Alexander B. Howard

The Washington correspondent for the tech powerhouse O’Reilly
Media is a respected trend-spotter and chronicler of government’s use of
new media.
@digiphile

Allyson Kapin

The founder of the Women Who Tech conference has turned to
helping nonprofits grow online with her consulting firm, Rad
Campaign.
@WomenWhoTeach

Kay Koplovitz and Amy Millman

The chair and president of Springboard Enterprises are
connecting women entrepreneurs with investors.
@KayKoplovitz@amillman

Walt Mossberg

The Wall Street Journal’s personal-tech columnist, who
works from Washington, is still the man to know if you’re launching
anything, from an iPad to a new Microsoft Word, and his AllThingsD
conference and website are a force throughout Silicon Valley.
@waltmossberg

Shawn Osborne

The CEO of TechAmerica, who joined the industry group last
year, has tried to re-focus the sprawling organization on tech advocacy
and public policy.

Gary Shapiro

The CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association, which runs
January’s massive Consumer Electronics Show, has been an outspoken
industry voice on competitiveness and the innovation agenda.
@GaryShapiro

Chris Soghoian

As Internet-privacy issues come to the fore, the American Civil
Liberties Union’s tech-privacy expert is a leader in the debate, from such
gonzo-style tactics as creating fake airline boarding passes to pioneering
the widely adopted “do not track” browser mechanism.
@csoghoian

Charles Steger

The president of Virginia Tech, a long way from DC in miles,
has taken the Washington area by storm with his expanding cyberprograms at
the university’s Northern Virginia campus.

Christopher Wolf

As director of Hogan Lovells’ Privacy and Information
Management practice group, Wolf is at the leading edge of one of tech’s
most critical legal gray areas.
@PrivacyWolf